Up Close and Personal: Louisville Ballet’s Choreographers' Showcase Packs the House

The annual Choreographers’
Showcase is fast becoming a hot ticket in town. The Louisville Ballet’s
Facebook postings have announced all week that the Saturday performance is sold
out, and at last night’s opening performance the bleachers in the Ballet’s Main
Street headquarters were packed.

Artistic Director Bruce
Simpson introduced the evening, putting it into context with the process
through which the company goes to select and rehearse the ballets of the
Choreographers’ Showcase. The most impressive piece of information he shared is
that each choreographer is given an hour of rehearsal per five minutes of
finished ballet; that’s a very short rehearsal period – especially for the
pieces with large ensembles. He also spoke of the courage it takes for a
choreographer to create a new work for public consumption.

This year’s Showcase
features eleven ballets by ten choreographers, two of whom are company trainees.
Several choreographers have had works in previous showcases.

The evening’s highlight for
me was Brandon Ragland’s Rumination
to Zoe Keating’s Exurgency. The compelling thrust of the music was beautifully
complemented by Mr. Ragland’s multi-layered sequences for pairs of dancers
(Albrechta, Corbitt Miller, Reinking O’Dell, Sellers, Forehand, Ichihashi,
Krieger and Stokes) with intricate partnering and figures that tested the
tension between forward energy and stasis. The deep red and black costuming
contributed to the visual strength of this piece. Thursday night’s audience
responded with a collective exhale as the ballet came to an end, attesting to
the power of this eight-minute collaboration between choreographer and composer.
Mr. Ragland also contributed Shostakovich
to the evening with music, not surprisingly, by Dmitri Shostakovich. Working
with a larger ensemble, Ragland’s choreography enters a more neoclassic style,
demonstrating fluid transitions between the two principal pairs (Natalia
Ashikhmina and Evgeni Dokoukine and Erica De La O and Kristopher Wojtera) and
various combinations of the larger ensemble. This piece was placed at the end
of the evening, but the resolution of the ballet did not feel "final." Maybe
it was the way this music selection ended, but the music did not resolve with a
sense of finality – for the piece or for the evening – and this undercut the assured
elegance of Mr. Ragland’s choreography. Nonetheless, both of his ballets this
evening speak to his growth as a choreographer, and we can look forward to his Silent Conversation, which is part of
the Ballet’s Breaking Ground program later this spring.

Also using Shostakovich’s
music, the Andante movement of his Second Piano Concerto, is Ashley Thursby’s Andante with Amanda Diehl and Mark
Krieger. Again, this was one of the more traditional choreographic
contributions to the evening, and it was danced with elegiac lissomeness. The
final lift was breathtaking in its sculpted simplicity and delicacy.Three other ballets focused on
pairs.Katarina Walker’s Cling was an interesting counterpoint to
the implicit similarity of theme in these two ballets.Set to Woman of Aran (British Sea
Power), Ms. Walker’s program note suggests that we want what we have until we
want something else. Chelsea Cambron and Justin Michael Hogan explore multiple
ways of clinging to a relationship through Ms. Walker’s interesting lifts and
partnering sequences; and throughout there is ambiguity about who is clinging
to the other, until the last moment when one decidedly pushes the other away,
leaving – presumably to cling to the next person. Static Traits by
Ryan Stokes explores yet another relationship. Mr. Stokes juxtaposes music by
Bach (Sonata #2 in A Minor) with costuming that suggests a mid-20th century middle America. Kateryna Sellers and Evgeni Dokoukine seem to be locked
into a troubled relationship in which the dynamics appear to be anything but
static – unless the static nature of this relationship revealed in the ending
that sets up that this dynamic will continue the next time, and the next. Rob
Morrow’s Why Was I Born? answers its
own question in the sweet relationship between Helen Daigle and Brandon Ragland
to music by John Coltrane and Kenny Burrell.

The evening opened with the
charming Fairy Tale Suite set to
Heigh-Ho! Mozart: Favorite Disney tunes in the style of Great Classical
Composers. Trainee Claire Horrocks (who is also one of the featured apprentices
on WFPL’s Audio Diary series, www.wfpl.org/term/big-break)
captures a youthful exuberance in her choreography, encapsulating the program
note that we never should grow too old for our childhood stories.The other trainee represented as a
choreographer in this program is Sanjay Saverimuttu offering Saligia with music by Olafur Arnalds and
Nils Frahm, a2 (Max Cooper Remix). This is one of two pieces (Ants in the Pants being the other) that
essays an ensemble of seven. While this specific number is engrained within the
theme of this piece, it is an ‘odd’ number, far more unwieldy than the more
traditional trio, and I found myself always wondering why that particular
combination was dancing and when (whether) the combination would change. Thematically, some sins were
graphically identified while others were etched in a more abstract way. I
suspect that the piece would be stronger if Mr. Saverimuttu committed to either
interpretation throughout.

The largest ensemble piece
of the evening was choreographed by Louisville Ballet newcomer Justin Michael
Hogan.A View, A Memory, A Choice is as its title suggests three
vignettes, each set to music by different composers. The first two vignettes
(Penguin Café Orchestra’s Perpetum Mobile and Trace Bundy’s Stone’s Serenade, respectively) move with a vigor and ease, dancers entering and exiting
constantly in different combinations repeating, with slight variations, floor patterns,
footwork, and gestures that collectively create a world of motion. The third vignette shifts in tone and
style. Set to Satie’s Gymnopedie #1, Kristopher Wojtera and Amanda Diehl, encounter
each other for a whimsical, tentative, almost-love story. Here Mr. Hogan
demonstrates a completely different sensibility, choreographing an elegant pas
de deux that finds space and stillness within it – a far cry from the busy-ness
of the first two vignettes.With
an acknowledgment that Trois Gymnopedies is one of my favorite pieces of music,
I have to confess that I found myself wishing that this vignette was separate
from the first two so it might become part of a ballet Mr. Hogan would set to
the complete Suite.

Shakin’
and the aforementioned Ants in the Pants
bring a very different energy to this evening of short ballets. Helen Daigle’s Shakin’ ended the first part of the program with a group of girls
ogling the moves of boxer Douglas Ruiz. With their costumes taking a bow to the ’80s of the recently seen Flashdance,
these girls clearly wanted to have fun! Creative partnering, non-traditional
lifts, and a sense of the herd mentality when a group settles on who they want
to go after – this short piece had the audience chuckling from its earliest
moments. Especial mention must be made of the fun that Rob Morrow had in this
piece…Ben Needham-Woods’ Ants in the
Pants, dedicated to a younger (I assume) brother, was another light-hearted
piece. From the top of the ballet when the audience observed the onset of the ants
– a clever digital trick – it’s amazing that sympathy itching did not ensue
throughout the house. The seven
dancers conveyed a sense of fun throughout this piece, the all-over itching
integrated into the dancing in a way that was both naturalistic and highly
stylistic. The first part of the
ballet was set to Michael Banabila’s Voltage Voltage. The second part, another
pas de deux with Leigh Anne Albrechta and Kazuki Ichihashi,was set to Sascha Funke’s Mango. Again I found
myself wondering why these two dances were put together under one title. I
enjoy juxtapositions, and yet (as with Mr. Hogan’s piece) I did not find an
internal logic to the juxtaposition, neither a parallel nor a contradiction
that for me justified the union. Certainly the first part of Ants stands alone very effectively. I
enjoyed the work of Amanda Diehlin the
latter part of the ballet, in isolation, despite my distraction about its fit
with the first section.

Collectively these eleven
ballets provide the audience with a dynamic and thought-provoking evening of
dance. The choreographers are
exploring a wide-range of music and ideas with a strong company of dancers
embodying those ideas. That the
Louisville Ballet carves out time in a busy season of productions and
educational work to nurture company choreographic talent is impressive. That
Louisville audiences have the opportunity to watch young choreographers grow in
their craft is something for which we should be grateful. Here’s to the 2014
Showcase!

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